People are increasingly relying on portable computing devices for a variety of different tasks. Many of these tasks involve various functions that can be performed with a user navigating to a specific location or interface to select a specific function. Similarly, various instances of content have different pieces of information available from different locations, to which a user has to navigate if the user wishes to view that information. It is often the case, however, that users have difficulty in navigating to specific locations on a touch screen of a portable computing device, as the size of the elements on the display screen are relatively small with respect to the size of the user's finger, such that it can be difficult for the user to accurately select the intended object. Further, if the computing device uses motions or gestures to control the navigation it can be difficult to determine the intent of various gestures, as a user might want to move a finger to scroll to a location and then select an item, zoom into an item, etc., but the software on computing device can have difficulty distinguishing the motions for each of these actions, which can be frustrating for a user when the user has to repeat an action several times or perform different actions to obtain the desired result.